Don't read this to my kids

Picture book reviews and review videos by Cassandra Gelvin

I think you kind of have to be a penguin fan going into this. Obviously the syntax is very simple. Every page has exactly two words on it. There's no real information about penguins. There's nothing in here about what they eat, how they raise their young, or the fact that they can't fly or anything like that.

Every time you can see her face, pretty much all you can see is these solid black eyes, with a little bit of eyelash at the edge. Like this girl has been possessed by demons. I just do not care for the art style of this artist, and the story uses far too many words to tell this completely trivial story.

Maybe there's some kind of metaphor here about cultural assimilation? It's really hard to tell what this author was intending exactly. The only information we get about her in the back of the book is that it's her first book and that she was born in Hawaii. It is pretty, though.

I'm not really sure what to say. It feels like it's aimed at a very specific audience, namely children who have just had a younger sibling born who has Down syndrome, which is a very small audience. I guess you could give it to a child if you were trying to explain what Down syndrome was. But basically the only thing says is what Down syndrome isn't. It doesn't say what it is.

There was no reason for him to believe that the pony would help him. So he was just basically playing with a toy that he made himself and then the toy became real, Velveteen-Rabbit-style. Unless there's some kind of tradition of making ponies out of mud and treating them as if they're real, and it does not imply that there is.

Oh my god, a typewriter! I've never seen one of those before! This is the best day of my life!

The message is clearly about the power of imagination. I don't know how a story this inventive and fantastical and unique is executed with this much cliche. It just ends up being so trite. It's pretty. It's nice to look at. But that's strictly because the guy's a good artist.

It's definitely a unique book. You don't see a lot of pictures of live animals in different poses. This is the kind of thing that would normally be illustrated, but she took pictures and made a story out of what she could make pictures of. I really think that she would benefit from collaborating with somebody who could write well and come up with ideas for her to do.